…I drove to the county recorder’s office with Frank’s 1998 survey in my lap, and from there to a real-estate lawyer, and by the end of the week that stack of violations wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.
Here’s what Frank knew, and what those stakes proved. Our house was the third one ever built out there — years before anybody dreamed up an HOA. When the association filed its declaration, our lot, one of the original three, was never annexed into it. Frank surveyed it and recorded it himself in ’98, clean and clear. I am not a member of that HOA. I never have been. Their covenants do not touch one inch of my property, and they never did.
Every fine that man threatened me with is void. Every lien he promised can’t attach to a thing. “We’ll get the house one way or another” turned out to be a whole lot of nothing.
And there was more, because Frank was thorough. His stakes showed that the neighborhood’s walking path and their fancy entrance sign sit partly on my land — land the HOA’s been using without a word for twenty years.
So when the president came back around with his clipboard, my lawyer sent him a letter of his own. It explained that I owe his association nothing, answer to it in no way — and that if he’d like to keep his path and his sign on my property, he might try asking a grieving widow nicely.
Frank’s roses are still blooming. His little flag’s still by the mailbox. And his “realistic” son-in-law never did get the listing.
He banged on a grieving widow’s door certain he’d have her house one way or another — never once checking whether her house had ever belonged to his HOA at all.